The Guilty: (P.I. Jack Marconi No. 3) Page 15

  Making a complete three-sixty while maintaining my pace, I scanned my entire horizon and saw nothing there. No one following me. No one visible in the white lamplight. No one lurking in the shadows. Only me, myself, and I.

  As I moved on toward the lake and the bridge that would take me across it, I knew that I had been living in the city for far too long. That the constant sounds of cars, people, equipment being loaded and unloaded, garbage trucks, horns, planes overhead, and more had somehow become peaceful music for me. And when it was replaced with silence, I felt nothing but an uncomfortable vulnerability.

  It happened just as I was taking the turn off the diagonal road onto a gravel walkway that I felt the impact against my upper back. The pain wasn’t sharp, but the impact was immediate—as if I had been slammed with the fat end of a baseball bat. I went down on my chest and face and slid a few inches along the gravel floor because of the momentum.

  I knew full well that I had been shot even if I hadn’t heard an explosion.

  My mortality oozed from my flesh and bones, along with my blood.

  For the moment, I maintained full clarity. But I knew it wouldn’t last.

  The darkness and silence that surrounded me was absolute. Still, I searched with my eyes for someone to reveal him or herself. But I could see nothing. My body was paralyzed and the eyesight I retained was beginning to fade away, much like the filament inside a light bulb that is about to burn out.

  I knew more about death and dying than I cared to know. That it could be a pleasant experience as opposed to a frightening one. There was no pain and there was no fear. There was only the feeling of leaving my body and rising above it as if I’d shed not my clothing, but my entire skin. In some ways, I was happy to be leaving myself behind while I rose up and stared down at my sad sack of bleeding flesh and bones.

  I caught sight of a white light that was more intense than anything I’d ever encountered. But it was also somehow pleasant. I started moving toward that light and I was giddy happy to be going wherever it was that I was going, even if all I found at the end of it was nothing but a restful and eternal sleep. But then, maybe it wouldn’t be eternal sleep. Maybe at the end of that tunnel, Fran would be waiting for me. My true love, Fran.

  Sure, I was leaving Val behind. And I was leaving behind some unfinished business. For instance, maybe I would never know the real truth behind the mystery of Sarah Levy’s battered head other than what Daphne revealed. That Robert David Jr. would strap her to that wheel and watch while she was play-raped repeatedly and while she screamed for them to stop. While she begged to be released. But her cries of distress were all a part of the game. It made them only attack her and each other all the more. She fed them with her screams and her struggles, and it was as close as anyone could come to summoning the devil in the Albany suburbs. They loved every minute of it. Everyone, that is, except for the main attraction strapped to the wood wheel: Sarah Levy.

  Death was no longer a mystery for me. We all owe God a death, and I was paying my final debt in spades. I followed the light and I flew through an eternal black space, and I looked forward to seeing Fran once more.

  I never once looked back at this horrid, black earth.

  BOOK II

  39

  I WOKE UP ANGRY inside a big room filled with equipment, bright lights, and people.

  An intense pain circulated throughout my upper body. It felt electrically charged. My mouth tasted of dried, caked blood. My head ached as though it had been split down the center with an ax. The pain extended to my right shoulder. I tried to talk, but my jaw felt clamped shut, as though someone had bolted it closed while I laid passed out. But my jaw wasn’t clamped shut at all. A thick white plastic tube had been shoved inside it. The tube ran down my throat. It made me feel as though I were choking. Which is why I yanked it out while trying to sit up.

  Bells, whistles, and alarms exploded.

  A nurse who happened to be walking by stopped and took a good look at me. She was young, strawberry blonde, and blue eyed. She shouted something out that I could not understand. Her voice sounded distant and muffled. More nurses and a doctor approached. The white, ceiling-mounted lights surrounded them like an angelic hue. Someone tried to shove the tube back down my throat. I resisted. Another needle was inserted into my forearm.

  Me, the angry but alive patient, fell back into a deep, painless sleep.

  40

  THE SECOND TIME I woke up, I was alone.

  I’d been moved from ICU to my own private room. Or so it didn’t take me long to notice. Someone must have pulled some strings.

  Miller.

  I tried to shift my head on the pillow from my right to my left, but my neck was too stiff and sore. Didn’t matter. I knew without having to look that I was alone. The tube in my mouth and throat had been removed, and other than an intravenous line needled to my forearm, I wasn’t attached to any equipment. The once intense pain in my upper body had downgraded to a dull, throbbing pain in my right shoulder. I shifted my body and managed to sit up, but only slightly. It dawned on me that maybe I’d died and this is what heaven looked like. No offense to God and His support staff, but if this was paradise then I was about to lodge a complaint. I wondered where the angels were. Where Jesus was hiding. Not a single pearly gate was to be found.

  The door opened then, and a man came in.

  I looked up at the tall, thin, suit-jacketed man.

  “You don’t look like Jesus to me,” I said, my voice cracking and throat scratchy, as though the skin were peeling back away from it with every word. Detective Nick Miller pulled a chair up and sat down beside me.

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve caught a bullet,” he said. “Docs tell me you died a clinical death for about a minute. What was it like?”

  “God puts on a pretty good light show,” I whispered. Then I asked him for some water. He handed me a little plastic cup that was sitting on the stand beside the bed. It had a straw sticking up out of it. With his help, I was able to suck some water through the straw. It burned the back of my throat. But the water was welcome all the same.

  He crossed his long legs.

  “You’re a lucky man,” he said. “Docs tell me the round more or less skidded off the top of the trapezius on your right shoulder. You won’t ever see a nickel’s worth of skin and flesh again but you didn’t lose a whole lot of blood. Shock of the bullet striking you was enough to cause an erratic heartbeat and to stop your heart altogether for a half minute or so when they finally got you on the table in emergency surgery.”

  “You mean I had a heart attack . . . Exactly how long have I been out?”

  “Thirty-six hours,” he said. “And cardiac arrest was how it was explained to me. Your heart is otherwise healthy.”

  “You’re not a doctor, but you play one on TV.” I looked around. “Where’s Val?”

  “Sent her home. Before she had an honest to goodness heart attack. She’s been tending to you for days with no sleep.”

  It felt nice being loved.

  I shoved myself up a little more against the pillows.

  “Who did this to me?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “Ballistics,” I said. “I’m guessing a .38.”

  “Very good. If the shooter were any good, I’d be making plans to attend your funeral.”

  “Warms the heart. Whose .38 in your opinion exactly?”

  “If you had to make a very good guess, who would you choose?”

  “The man who tailed me after I interviewed Penny David. The man I let go after he nearly drove off the bridge. The man who carried a .38 which I tossed over the bridge.”

  “The man who works for the Davids.”

  “You got him in custody?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Goodie.”

  “Goodie?”

  “’Cause when I get out of this bed, I’m going to kill him.”

  “Perhaps when said man finds out you’re not dead yet, he wil
l try for a third time.”

  “And when he does, you and the entire APD will be waiting for him, right?” If it were possible for me to smile sardonically, I would have. But the fact of the matter is that I couldn’t manage to work up a smile at all. Miller, on the other hand, had no trouble smiling. Sardonically.

  “I guess you and Sarah Levy have similar problems,” Miller said. “The Davids want you silenced.”

  My throat was moistening so that I could speak almost normally.

  “Is Sarah safe?” I asked.

  “She’s safe. And still recovering rapidly. She’s been talking, Keeper. She’s been coming out with things. Memories from that night.”

  I shifted myself up a little more. There was some pain, but not a lot. More like discomfort, probably from the few staples that kept the wound on my shoulder closed. So I assumed.

  “What has she revealed?”

  “She keeps referring to Junior as the devil. Someone she believed was a saint at first. Until he revealed himself in his true form.”

  I told Miller about my meeting with Daphne, not an hour before I was shot. Told him about what she told me. About the things Junior wanted Sarah to do for him. For the others. How their perverted actions and the sex room they performed them in looked to be entirely inspired by some shady book of erotica. When I was through, his face looked as pale as mine must have looked.

  “There’s something else too,” Miller said. “Sarah’s been talking about her ex-husband, Michael. It’s the first time she’s mentioned him in all these months.”

  “What’s she been saying?”

  “Something that is sure to piss Junior off even more.”

  “My ears still work.”

  Miller exhaled.

  “She told her doctors that she still loves him,” he said. “That she wants to go back to him.”

  41

  FOUR DAYS PASSED BEFORE I could lie there idly no more.

  Sarah Levy was still in danger, and Junior was still free to silence her whenever he felt the time was right. But in my mind, time was running out and had been ever since Sarah began her road to recovery.

  I slid out of bed and started making preparations to leave the hospital. The doctor, however, insisted that I remain in bed for yet another full week. But time to heal was not a luxury I enjoyed. Not only was Sarah Levy in danger, but I was also a sitting duck. It wasn’t a matter of if the goon who shot me would return soon. It was just a matter of precisely where and when he’d strike for a third time.

  Val had been with me every night of my hospital stay, on occasion nodding off in the chair and having to crawl home after midnight. When I called her and told her my plans for leaving, she hemmed and hawed about me leaving too early. But knowing me as well as she did, she didn’t push the point for too long. She knew how stubborn I could be. At the very least, she wanted to pick me up and take me home, where she would no doubt dote over me like a mother with a sick child. But not only did I not want her underfoot, I couldn’t risk placing her life in danger. Someone tried to kill me, after all. Twice. It’s possible they would try again for a third time, and this time they might get it right. Better that Val didn’t stand between me and the Almighty if or when it happened.

  Instead of Val, I called Blood and asked him to use his spare key to enter into my apartment, grab the 4Runner keys and to use it to pick me up ASAP. He told me he’d drop everything to come and get me. I signed off on my discharge, praying that my New York State Law Enforcement Union 82 medical plan would pick up the bill.

  Dressed in my now dry but bloodied running clothes, I refused a wheelchair, and took the elevator down to the front entrance of the hospital and waited for the Sentinel of Sherman Street. Turns out, he was already waiting for me. I got in on the passenger side, wincing as I closed the door with my good, left hand.

  “You’ve gone from white-bread to chalk,” Blood said, not without a smile.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Drive. Please.”

  “Yes, Warden Marconi,” he said, and he pulled out of the lot and onto the road that would lead back into the heart of my city.

  The way I saw it, I had two overriding problems to contend with.

  First and most importantly: Sarah Levy was in danger. If the Davids were after me and willing to execute me out in the open in cold blood, then she no doubt occupied a prominent spot on the to-be-exterminated list. Why hadn’t they already gotten her assassination over with by now? Especially with me laid up in a hospital bed for a full week? Two reasons. First, she was more or less protected behind the brick walls and iron bars of that recuperative hospital in Schenectady. And second, her sudden murder would open up an entirely new can of worms for Robert David Jr. and his father. On the other hand, my sudden death would be considered a hazard of the job. Maybe the work of a former inmate or someone I helped put in prison over the years I’d been a private detective.

  Another problem: I was coming very close to having all the fuel I’d need not only for Harold Sanders to win his coveted forty million dollar civil suit against the David empire, but more importantly, I’d have the evidence, both circumstantial and real, that would at least give the APD reason to speed up their investigation into Robert David Jr. and what would now be considered the attempted second-degree murder of his fiancée. It might even be enough to place him under arrest. But that might be wishful thinking.

  In the end, time was getting short for both me and Junior. That meant Junior was becoming more desperate to keep his name clean and to keep on living the life of privilege that David Sr. had afforded him for so many years. A desperate Junior meant that I had to keep on watching my back. Maybe now more than ever, considering I’d been shot and survived it with only an exaggerated flesh wound and a temporarily broken heart.

  What to do next: first things first.

  “You get the password for the laptop, Blood?” I asked.

  He nodded in the affirmative, his eyes on the road.

  “Your man see anything of interest on Junior’s hard-drive?”

  “You didn’t ask us to look at the hard drive. You ask us for the code. We do only what we’re told to do. No more. No less.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “We’re serious about our work, Keep. You don’t stay in business long you start getting nosy in places you don’t belong.”

  “Soon as we get to my place, we can copy the entire hard-drive and then we’ll hand the computer over to Detective Miller.”

  He looked at me quizzically, then returned his eyes to the city street as we came to a stoplight just before Lark Street.

  “That laptop is hot,” he said. “You sure Miller wants it?”

  “We got it all worked out. What I’ve been doing is trying to work up enough evidence against Junior so that Miller can convince a judge to grant him the search warrant.”

  “Sometimes you got to resort to some illegal means in order to get at the truth,” Blood said.

  “Precisely what I learned as a maximum security prison supervisor,” I said.

  By the time we pulled up outside of Sherman Street, my shoulder was throbbing in waves of pain. It was also bleeding. Maybe Blood couldn’t see the wound, but he could see my face. And I could tell he didn’t like what he saw.

  “Let’s get you inside and fixed up,” he said.

  I grunted a half-hearted, “Okay.”

  Then I opened my door, and nearly spilled out into the street. A sad, bleeding sack of rags and brittle bones.

  42

  BUT THERE WAS LITTLE time to worry about my shoulder. As soon as we got through the door, we headed for the bathroom where Blood did his best to clean the wound and change the bandages. A process he was all too familiar with after having grown up and survived in Albany’s south end—where Hope Street ended and Desperation Avenue began. We then convened in the kitchen where Junior’s computer was sitting on the counter, a plain, white, business-sized envelope resting on top of it.

  I picked up the envelope and
opened it. Unfolding the standard white copy stock, I found a typed password consisted of five upper case letters: DAVID. I had to laugh. If only I’d thought about using the most obvious of passwords when I was still inside Junior’s house I might have examined the computer without having to steal it. Oh well.

  I set the paper down, opened the computer and pressed the power button. While it was booting up, I headed into my dining room office, found a spare zip-drive in my desk drawer and brought it with me back to the kitchen where I plugged it into the port. The machine now fully booted, I typed “DAVID” into the designated space for the user password, then went into the laptop’s mainframe and typed in the commands that would allow for a total system back-up on to the zip drive.

  I pressed Enter and the back-up process began.

  Exiting the kitchen for the bedroom, I put on a fresh pair of Levis, my dark brown Tony Lama cowboy boots, and a clean navy blue button-down. I carried my blue blazer and my .45 back into the kitchen with me.

  “Need your help again,” I said to Blood, handing him the shoulder-holstered piece.

  He gently strapped the holster over my wounded shoulder.

  “You should have that arm in a sling,” he said. “Or you can take care of yourself properly and quit this job while you’re still alive. Admit yourself back into the hospital.”

  I looked at him. His hard face. His deep brown eyes. Today he was wearing a wide-brimmed New York Yankees baseball cap. The cap barely rested on his head and was angled just slightly against his right temple as if defying gravity.

  “It’s too late for that,” I said. “I know too much.”